Today’s Fibre Channel SANs are tasked with reliably delivering huge amounts of data with almost zero latency in an environment with a large variance of end device capabilities. Fibre Channel is a lossless network protocol, but what are the ramifications? What is considered a good SAN design and what are best practices? What situations can lead to suboptimal performance? How can a device that is not performing well affect the performance of devices even on different parts of the SAN? Can a device that is returning credits without delay affect the SAN just like a device that is returning credits slowly? This webcast provides the answers to these questions and more. For answers, join the FCIA on February 6th for our live webcast.

Roadmap Illustration

Fibre Channel has a laser-focus on speed and continues to progress at a blistering pace. Fibre Channel is continually evolving to higher speeds to meet the high bandwidth needs of storage applications. When large blocks of data are moved between servers and storage, the performance of the application is directly dependent on how fast the data can fly. The storage industry has come to rely on Fibre Channel to deliver superior performance and reliability for mission-critical applications.

Fibre Channel is at the heart of the data center connecting servers to storage, and relied upon for the most strenuous workloads. For example, Fibre Channel is deployed in many high-end applications in financial and governmental institutions where reliability and scalability are paramount. Fibre Channel consistently delivers greater than “five 9s” or 99.999% uptime as measured by vendors and customers in data center deployments worldwide. Fibre Channel storage area networks are often completely redundant to ensure constant service and uncorrupted data without single points of failure.

Solutions Guide

2017 is poised to be another great year for the Fibre Channel industry. Since the publication of our last FCIA Solutions Guide in 2016 there has been both tremendous industry progress and technical developments that will shape the future of the storage industry. The legacy of data reliability, integrity and security have always been the compass by which storage professionals make their choices, and not surprisingly Fibre Channel continues to be the interconnect of choice when those attributes are required….

The heart and soul of any technology, and the industry association that stewards the technology, is its technology roadmap. Just like the term suggests, a roadmap shows not just the history of a technology, but also is a guide to where it is going and when it is going to get there…

The SCSI protocol has been the bedrock foundation of all storage for more than three decades and it has served (and will continue to serve) customers admirably. SCSI protocol stacks are ubiquitous across all host operating systems, storage arrays, devices, test tools, etc. It’s not hard to understand why: SCSI is a high performance, reliable protocol with a comprehensive error and recovery management mechanisms built in…

Digital transformation is driving new requirements for scalability, performance, and high IOPs/low-latency for storage, with access to data becoming more critical than ever. Advanced flash memory technologies are forcing an evolution of storage requirements that must simultaneously enable faster access to data while accommodating growing capacity, all at decreasing costs. By many accounts, all-flash array technologies will dominate the primary storage market by the end of this decade, creating a profound impact in enterprise storage as well as a corresponding pressure on infrastructure…

Ah, storage. The most important part of any Data Center. Wait, wait, I get it – there are no unimportant parts of the Data Center. The ability to store and retrieve data, however, is the heart and soul, and the unmitigated catastrophe that befalls the company that loses data is impossible to overstate….

Broadcom Limited (AVGO) recently announced the launch of the latest NVMe and automation know-hows as well as Brocade G630 switch and Brocade FC32-64 port blade for the Brocade X6 director. https://www.nasdaq.com/article/broadcom-launches-new-nvme-storage-gen-6-fibre-channel-cm946432